Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
How Europe Became Europe
By Eric Christiansen
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350
by Robert Bartlett
Princeton University Press, 432 pp., $29.95
The best-selling History of Europe written in the early 1930s by H.A.L. Fisher (to alleviate the tedium of being head of an Oxford college) began with the sentence, 'We Europeans are the children of Hellas'—and went on through nearly two thousand years summarizing and judging the 'trend of events' by standards of rationality and civility at that time usually associated with the Ancient Greeks. Europe didn't come out so well at the end, but Fisher believed that a tradition of decency derived from antiquity was still there, in places, and that this was what made the continent worth bothering about; not Hitler. Few would agree with him now; many would like to. And the more up-to-date and less liberal views of European history which have superseded his are in their own way just as self-indulgent.
Review, 2897 words
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